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AM Class 4: Introduction to Acting!

Hey everyone! Week 1 of class 4 here at Animation Mentor has already come to and end! Class 4 is titled “Introduction to Acting”. My mentor for this term is Joseph Antonuccio, from Blue Sky Animation studios. Blue Sky for those of you that don’t know is the amazing animation studio that has brought you the titles such as the Ice Age movies, Rio and most recently Epic! Joseph is a Senior Animator and also an alumni of Animation Mentor. The first Q&A with him was really exciting and I cannot wait to see what all this class has in store for me.

Now that I am starting to dive into the real meat and potatoes of animation — acting — the assignments require a lot more from us as animators. The assignments also require a lot more structure and planning in the early stages. This term we are going to be creating a total of two shots. The first shot is a Pantomime assignment. Pantomime is essentially the area between Mime use of no props and no dialog, and Acting which is use of props and dialog. So in a Pantomime shot we are allowed to have props but all of the emotion, and storytelling has to be conveyed solely through body language and facial expressions. This is actually quite challenging. The guidelines for this assignment are to show a very clear change of emotion in the character and we have the limitation of only 5-8 seconds of animation. The second assignment for the term will be a dialog acting shot, with lip-sync and everything so stay tuned for the later weeks of the term to see my progress on that.

As for what I had to turn in this week, it was all my planning my pantomime shot.

The idea for my shot is:
Stan (my character) will be sitting at a bar after having a bad day, he is quite down on his luck and doesn’t have any more money to buy a beer. As he sits there sad and depressed, suddenly a big full mug of beer slides right in front of him from off-screen. This catches his attention, he sits back and looks around wearily. Stan is wondering why and who sent him this beer. After taking a moment to realize what has happened, Stan gets excited and scoops up the big mug of beer to his face. He then takes a long gulp from it. Stan then sets down the mug and is in a state of complete happiness and an overwhelming sense of relief because his day just got a lot better.